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I just watched a small inde movie called "Mars" which was shot as an animated short using people and green screen. Movies are more and more putting in whatever background they want. We certainly don't seem to mind.

But in photos, we expect some degree of truth. It's a picture and as they use to say, "Photos don't lie". That was true before the digital age and digital manipulation. Bad, good. Do you have the right to know if a photo has been altered? Certainly not in advertising, where models become poreless, super skinny and whatever else the photo editor demands.

I took some photos of Mark's Focus Jinx. The sky was blue, very blue. You can only do so much with the sun as a background to alter the pictures. So into the cloud vault kept on my computer of pictures taken some time in the past. Cleaning up all the rough spots around the kite and lines took about 45 minutes. Toyed with blurring the background a bit to give it that shorter depth of field look of a close shot, but that felt like cheating.

I choose not to disclose the % of 'touching' I do professionally, read into that: 'lots, but no one want's to know'

Now the problem you have is that although it's hard to put into words, the mash up you've done has a rookie error in it (tongue firmly in cheek )

It's the 2 different lenses used, for the landscape I'm guessing around the 35-50mm area and the kite was shot I'm thinking at around the 70-80mm when you merge these 2 perspectives you throw all the pespectives out slightly in the brain and it goes... 'hmmmm there's something a little odd about that shot'. If you get that feeling the dual perspectives are generally the cause half the time, the other half is left/right lighting which you've handled very well, both strong sunlit shots lit from upper right

I have a problem with "monkeying around" with photos for publication as fact which punches my ethics button.The reason being because I was a news photog for almost 40 years and believe that the scene of whatever is shot as newsworthy should be presented as is. Advertising shots don't count -- that's fantasy nor do personal photos because those are for the photogs own pleasure. However, when shown to another person the viewer deserves to know the picture has been enhanced.

What an interesting thread here.Regarding what is real and not, everything here is real but not true!John had a nice job done in masking and collage here and resizing the kite could have given a bit more of fact here although i don't see any fantasy here WD is right with the perspective theory and blurring the background to put some truth in the DOF is a good idea but if we use a hyperfocal distance focusing method here, we should get a sharp kite with an acceptably sharp background. But for this to work we need a small aperture f16-f22 and shutter would have been lowered resulting in a more blurry kite due to motion . Anyway we are well lit here so lets say exposure was about 1/320s..enough to expose at f16 and to freeze motion of the kite in the air.I myself, even if i do not use collage method, i manually blend exposures of the same scene to enlarge my dynamic range when even my filters will not cover the whole scene. Not actually the cartoonish HDR we see from many folks, but a most fine blended photo matching reality at the time taken.

Personally one error (if we can call it like this) i see from the picture is not treating and processing the final collated layers with the same adjustments. Final layered photo if the pictures were not edited individually before, need to be processed and flattened to avoid pixel interpolation between two or multiple layers I downloaded your photos and did some basics editing on it. Sorry i took it without asking permission but at the time i am posting, you are flying your Solus in your dreams

Overall, this is a nice montage and reducing the kite size would have been a bit better IMO.

I think at times it's about lookin as if it's fake, that is the point. I think you can make just about anything look real without trying too hard.I also think the lighting is off on the quad.Or maybe just because I knew it was a fake based on the subject matter? mind over matter?

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